Zebras Without Stripes : A Whistle-Blower’s Story

Last week, an academic paper surfaced that found racial bias among referees in the National Basketball Association. There was immediate banter about its validity (some of it from academics, but most from people associated with the NBA), but we wanted to take a week and look over the 43-page paper to see if we could figure out what merit and/or weaknesses might be present.

Rather than provide yet another overview of the findings, we direct you to this New York Times story and to the paper itself.

After receiving a draft of the paper last year, the NBA commissioned its own study, which found no statistically significant evidence of racial bias in league officiating. The NBA study is fraught with problems, most notably that it includes only a fraction of the number of games (and fouls) in the original study and that it fails to control for the myriad variables the authors of the academic paper included (position and size of players, all-star status, etc.). However, the NBA study has one major advantage over the academic paper, and this causes us to wince a bit at the latter’s findings, which we fully expect are accurate.

Because the league refused to release their data on individual referees’ calls against specific players, the academic authors had to rely on publicly available “box scores” that show, among other statistics, the number of fouls each player received in the game. They categorized the race of the referees for each game in terms of the racial composition of the three-person crew, since they had no way of knowing which of the three referees called fouls on which of the players. That is, a crew was either categorized as all-white, all-black, 2/3 white or 1/3 white. Without knowing exactly which referee called a foul on which player, the empirical argument about racial bias is suspect when scholarly standards are applied.

That does not mean, however, that the study is not rigorous (it will very likely be published after vetted through the peer-review process) or substantively inaccurate. As several commentators have pointed out, scholars have found empirical evidence of unconscious bias in other areas of American life – why would the NBA be immune?

If you only listened to the NBA players, though, you’d believe that they live in a racially-equal utopian bubble within our larger racist culture. We’ve seen no report of a black player corroborating the findings or even failing to call them into question. The AP reports that P.J. Brown said, “Somebody’s got too much time on their hands.” Phil Jackson said, “you can almost make statistics prove what you want to prove.” This is a common response to our work, as well. “If you’re looking for it, of course you’re going to find it!”

What is most encouraging about this study and the attention paid to it by the mainstream public, however, is that it has stimulated more discussion about implicit racism as opposed to explicit bigotry. To date, our work has not sparked such a widespread discussion. Other studies on topics such as job hiring have not received this much attention. But released in the context of the NBA finals, this study that has the effect of calling into question the results of basketball games (and thus is of interest to a much larger audience) has bloggers writing about “cognitive racism” and “affinity bias.” To be fair, these are blogs that have considered the complexities of race in the past (blackprof does so regularly), but we expect that folks who have never visited those sites before have done so in the last week to find out what’s going on.

So we’re disappointed with the data available to the authors of the scholarly piece (it would be wonderful if the NBA would release its data to them), but the end-result is still important: there is certainly implicit racial bias in the NBA as in all other aspects of American culture, and more people are becoming familiar with the differences between racism and bigotry than ever before.